Green publishing — using technology to print materials on-site
Printed materials weigh a lot. From books to corporate brochures, these bulky materials are costly to ship and costly for the environment in terms of emissions from the planes, trains and trucks that transport them.
Normally, books are printed in one place, shipped worldwide to distributors and then forwarded to booksellers, each step of which can significantly contribute to the total volume of greenhouse gases an organization or company emits.
That opens a niche for what some organizations and entrepreneurs are calling “green” publishing — using technology to print these materials on-site rather than burn money and fuel on shipping.
(Newspapers like the International Herald Tribune, owned by The New York Times Company, already use information technology to print hundreds of thousands of copies sent by satellite to dozens of print sites around the world every day.)
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank for industrialized countries, “green” publishing is particularly appropriate for readers and customers in far-flung global markets.
Fittingly, starting on Tuesday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris will be printing and selling its latest primer on sustainable development, “O.E.C.D. Insights: Sustainable Development,” at a bookstore in Australia on a device called the Espresso Book Machine.
The machines also will be used to print the book, which aims to outline ways countries can promote sustainable economic growth, as needed at locations in the United States, Canada, Britain and Egypt.
The O.E.C.D. says that by using the machine – which prints books on demand complete with color cover in a few minutes – will be practicing what it preaches: Each of the books printed and sold through the Angus & Robertson bookshop in Melbourne will save 5.8 kilograms in carbon emissions, the agency calculates.
“Using this approach, publishing can become a ‘just-in-time’ business that is both economically more efficient and friendlier to the environment,” said Toby Green, the head of publishing at the O.E.C.D.
But like so much that is leaner and greener, the initiative comes at a cost.
The Espresso Book Machine, made by a company called On Demand Books, costs about $100,000 for a single unit. Still, On Demand Books says the concept of what it calls an “ATM for books” has a bright future and that it already has printed, bound and automatically trimmed thousands of “library-quality perfect-bound” books in sites across the world.
(That would include the New York Public Library, which began experimenting with an E.B.M. unit in the summer of 2007.)
Mr. Green of the O.E.C.D. said bookstores and libraries around the world either lease or buy the machines from On Demand Books. He said revenue from printing the book on sustainable development would be split in roughly three ways, between the bookstore and On Demand Books and with a royalty for the O.E.C.D.
Tags: Green Publishing